Around the turn of the sixteenth century, printers working throughout Castile found themselves in straits so dire that the years 1501–10 have been called ‘los años negros de la edición española’ (Berger 64). In spite of Crown and Church patronage, the death of several major printers working in Spain as well as the rise of monopolies abroad left Peninsular firms struggling to survive. Desperate for income, Castilian printers began to devise ways to attract the business of local readers. One strategy was the printing of previous works, especially fifteenthcentury narratives, written in Spanish. Some firms undertook to reprint popular works first published prior to 1500, including Cárcel de amor, Celestina and Libro del Arcipreste de Talavera. The success of this strategy inspired printers to develop entire ‘editorial genres’, or groups of works published to meet the growing demand for literary works written in Castilian, including love poetry, long and short chivalric romances and medieval chronicles. The driving economic interest behind the publication of older literature in sixteenth-century Spain leads Infantes to identify the printed book and its circulation as a type of commercial ‘interference’ between text and reader (115).

Consumer demand also obliged editors to tailor older material to meet contemporary tastes, a phenomenon I call ‘editorial interference’. In some cases, the editors sought the public's approval through attractive formats. The prologue to Juan de Vilches’ Bernadina de illustris, for example, promises that the printer Zapata of Seville ‘os dará los buenos autores que deseáis […] las obras enmendadas en sus tipos y adornadas con figuras’ (qtd. in Domínguez Guzmán 283).